Singularity UniversityPanel on Open Source2009-07-28

The Commons as a collective intelligence meta-innovation

Mike LinksvayerCreative Commons

Photo by asadal Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/68242677@N00/2117153416/

Creative Commons .ORG

Nonprofit organization, launched to public December 2002

HQ and ccLearn in San Francisco

Science Commons division at MIT

~70 international jurisdiction projects, coordinated from Berlin

Foundation, corporate, and individual funding

Born at Stanford, supported by Silicon Valley

Enabling Reasonable Copyright

Space between ignoring copyright and ignoring fair use & public good

Legal and technical tools enabling a Some Rights Reserved model

Like free software or open source for content/mediaBut with more restrictive options

Media is more diverse and at least a decade(?) behind software

Six Mainstream Licenses

Lawyer Readable

Human Readable

Machine Readable

Machine Readable (Work)

My Book by
My Name
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at example.com.

DRMfree

DRM Voodoby psd licensed under CC BY 2.0http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1806247462/

Software/Culture (i)

Utilitarian/obvious but narrow reuse vs non-utilitarian but universal reuse possibleGecko in Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird... = Obvious

Device driver code in web application = Huh?

Cat photos and heavy metal = music video

Software/Culture (ii)

Maintenance necessary vs rareNon-maintained software = dead

Maintained cultural work = pretty special

(Wikis are somewhat like software in this respect)

Software/Culture (iii)

Roughly all or nothing modifiable form vs varied and degradable formsYou have the source code or you dont

Text w/markup > PDF > Bitmap scan

Multitracks > High bitrate > Low bitrate

Software/Culture (iv)

Construction is identical to creating modifiable form vs. iteratively leaving materials on the cutting room floor

Software/Culture (v)

Why NoDerivatives and NonCommercial?Legal sharing of verbatim works made interesting by filesharing wars

Maybe less emphasis on maintenance meansRestrictions on field of use less impactful

Free commercial use more impactful on existing business models

Sofware/Culture (vi)

Commercial anticommonsWhen distributed maintenance is important, NC is unusable for business (one explanation of why free software open source)

Maybe some artists want a commercial anticommons: nobody can be exploited ... but most want to exploit commerce. NC maybe does both.

History (i)

Some evocative dates for software ...1983: Launch of GNU Project

1989: GPLv1

1991: Linux kernel, GPLv2

1993: Debian

1996: Apache

1998: Mozilla, open source, IBM

History (ii)

... evocative dates for software1999: crazine$$

2004: Firefox 1.0

2007: [AL]GPLv3

????: World Domination

History (iii)

Open content licenses (some of them Free):1998: Open Content License

1999: Open Publication License

2000: GFDL, Free Art License

2001: EFF Open Audio License

History (iv)

Other early 2000s open content licenses (some of them Free):Design Science License, Ethymonics Free Music Public License, Open Music Green/Yellow/Red/Rainbow Licenses, Open Source Music License, No Type License, Public Library of Science Open Access License, Electrohippie Collective's Ethical Open Documentation License

History (v)

Versioning of Creative Commons licenses (some of them Free):2002: 1.0

2004: 2.0

2005: 2.5

2007: 3.0

History (vi)

Anti-proliferation?2003: author of Open Content/Publication licenses recommends CC instead and PLoS adopts CC BY2004: EFF OAL 2.0 declares CC BY-SA 2.0 its next versionNo significant new culture licenses since 20022008+: Possible Wikipedia migration to CC BY-SA

Indicators (community)

1993: Debian :: 2001 : Wikipedia8 years

Wikipedias success came faster and more visibly

Does Wikipedia even need an Ubuntu (2004)?

But how typical is Wikipedia of free culture?

Indicators (business)

1989: Cygnus Solutions :: 2003 : Magnatune14 years

Cygnus acquired by Red Hat (1999); Magnatunes long term impact TBD

Magnatune may not be Free enough for some, but it seems like the best analogy for now

Indicators (big business)

1998: IBM :: ???? : ?No analogous investments have been made in free culture. Most large computer companies have now made large investments in free/open source software

1998: Microsoft :: 2008 : Big MediaCould Microsofts attitude toward openness a decade ago be analogous to big medias today?

Indicators (Wikitravel)

Very cool round-trip story:2003: Launch, CC BY-SA

2006: Acquired by Internet Brands

2008: First Wikitravel Press paper titles

Community is the new IP?

Indicators (NIN)

Ghosts I-IV released 2008 under CC BY-NC-SA:$1.6m gross in first week

$750k in two days from limited edition ultra deluxe edition

This while available legally and easily, gratis.

NC doesnt seem important in this story ... yet

Indicators (Summary Guesses)

Free culture is at least a decade behind free softwareExcept where it has mass collaboration/maintenance aspects of software, where it may rocket ahead (Wikipedia)Generally culture is much more varied than software; success will be spikey

In Innovation, Meta is Max

The max net-impact innovations, by far, have been meta-innovations, i.e., innovations that changed how fast other innovations accumulated.

Robin Hanson (Economist)http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/meta-is-max---i.html

Collective Intelligence

Meta innovation?

Commons

Meta innovation for Collective Intelligence?

$2.2 trillion

Value of fair use in the U.S. Economy

http://www.ccianet.org/artmanager/publish/news/First-Ever_Economic_Study_Calculates_Dollar_Value_of.shtml also see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7643

Cyber terrorism(Cyber terror war on)

Privacy breaches

Loss ofGenerativity

Lock-in

Surveillance

DRM

Censorship

Suppressionof innovation

Electoral fraud

Luddism

Threat categories

Legitimate security issues

Protectionism

Politics and power

Security theater and fear-based responses (driven by all of above, not just legitimate security issues)

What digital freedoms needed for beneficial collective intelligence?

Keep same rights online/digitally that we (should anyway) have offline/IRL

Permit innovation and participation enabled by digital world even if not possible before (probably follows from above)

How building the commons (free software, free culture, and friends) helps

Security

Data shows FLOSS is more secure

Security through obscurity doesnt work

FLOSS encourages a heterogeneous computing environment

Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM and other mechanisms that sacrifice security to other goals

Protectionism

Peer production undermines policy arguments for protecting knowledge industries

Free software and free culture both allergic to DRM

Politics and power

Free software and culture improve transparency

... and the ability of all to participate

Peer production works against concentrated power doesnt require concentrated production structures and lowers barriers to entry

Security theater and fear

Access to facts mitigates fear and allows rational evaluation of responses

Commons work against three previous threats that drive security theater and fear

Can the success of the (digital) commons alter how we view freedom and power generally?

The gate that has held the movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by software, more and more of the value in society becomes non-rivalrous: it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if it is held by a few.

Eben Moglen

If we dont want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate, not one who is successful at taking from others.

Richard Stallman

i.e., we can form collective intelligences instead of forced collectives ... and still change the world

Building the commons is key to achieving a good future

Politicians and corporations are unimaginative ... they need to see solutions, or they react in fear

A dominant commons makes many collective stupidity scenarios much less likely

Beneficial collective intelligence needs universal access to culture, educational resources, research ... in machine-readable form

Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

AttributionAuthor: Mike Linksvayer

Link: http://creativecommons.org

Questions?ml@creativecommons.org

Detail of image by psd Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805374441